When I was a child, one of the highlights of Christmas morning was the anticipation of opening the latest annual that had been left by Father Christmas (my parents were always very anti using the term Santa). Would it be the latest annual from Blue Peter, or Dennis the Menace, or the Goodies? One year I even remember getting the Rolf Harris Annual – not much of a demand for that these days…

Back then everyone had an annual. And here’s an early Christmas present from me to you – because at Purple Salix we’re bring back the Annual! More

How’s your day so far? Spent all day shovelling emails, rushing from meeting to meeting, being super-busy but not getting anything significant done? Is the to-do list that you wrote three days ago gathering dust somewhere? Then this one’s for you…

You’re a creative Duracell-bunny – constant thoughts and ideas. Some you write down, many you don’t. Many just come and then go away again, like football managers. But how many of those ideas have you done anything substantive with? Any? Or have you simply been… too busy? More

Yesterday, 1000 of the great and the good (and me) from the B2B Marketing industry gathered at the Business Design Centre in Islington for a fabulous all day event – B2B Ignite. Congratulations to all the B2B Marketing team for an exceptional day.

In a day that was packed with content about ABM, AI, Content Marketing and the Martech landscape, I had the pleasure of sharing a few thoughts on how we can achieve greater productivity. From the feedback it was clear that it’s an area that all of us in Marketing are struggling with.

If your todo list is just getting longer – even to the point that you don’t want to look at it, then this post is for you. You need a process alongside your lists that helps you make sense of it all, pick up the stuff that might otherwise fall between cracks, and ensure you keep your commitments and show up well prepared. Perhaps you’re lucky enough to have a PA to help with all this? But help is at hand for the rest of us in the shape of our Weekly Review – a habitual checkpoint process that acts as the glue to help you have a more productive and stress-free week. Let me explain… More

Over the last week I’ve had a couple of detailed discussions with people about how we approach our todo lists and in particular how we ensure that we feel good about what we’ve accomplished during the day. A common concern seems to be “I’ve been really busy all day doing stuff, but I don’t seem to have got anything significant done”.

For me, Productivity is not a goal – it’s simply a set of habits aimed at helping me get my most important stuff done in the most efficient way. While tools are important, they won’t make you more productive by themselves; nor will they tell you what your goals are. However they can support you in developing better habits and making better choices.

The media is under fire! Cries of “Fake News” are hurled at stories to cover a myriad of possibilities including completely fabricated articles, articles from opposing viewpoints and even satire.

So this seems to be the perfect time to talk about my own newspaper called the Purple Patch and confess that a little of it is fake news. But only for fun – I’m not trying to rig my local parish council election here.

If you have been following and applying this series from the start, you will have evolved your CRM to be an asset of significant value to your business. However the steps are a little laborious, so I’m always on the lookout for little hacks that can be used to automate some of these tasks. I have found 3 that I really want to share – but would love to hear from you if you have come across others. There are free versions of each of them that are perfectly usable, but even the paid-for versions are inexpensive and can save you hours. More

In the first two articles of this series, I looked at how to devise a Hubspot CRM strategy and how you can import data from your most critical sources. In this post I’ll look at how you can massage and manipulate the data you’ve imported, so that it is coherent and valuable for you.

By now you probably have quite a large number of fields that you’ve added to your default set within Hubspot. Now we need to start cleaning!
To clean and manipulate my CRM data I used a combination of spreadsheet functionality and the ability to create customised views within Hubspot.

In the first part of this series I described how I wanted to build a CRM system for my business based around the free Hubspot CRM. In this part I’ll walk you through the steps I used to integrate data from 3 critical sources: LinkedIn, Google Contacts and other third party sources such as Lead Forensics or Event attendee lists etc. More